Haywire (35 page)

But what was amazing, stupefying, stunning was the impression we had of her on opening night. We were unprepared. We had no idea, no idea at all. She was absolutely wonderful. “I rely on you to be my harshest critics,” she’d said wistfully when we’d kissed her backstage beforehand. And she was right; Brooks Atkinson was no better equipped than we. Exposed to every nuance, every trick in her performances at home, we were primed to pick her performance on stage to pieces. But on stage all the tricks fell into place. Gestures, movements, voice inflections that might seem a shade too broad, too histrionic for the business of everyday life were totally right when mounted on a proscenium, bathed in intense light, and viewed from a distance of thirty-odd feet. We were shocked that she had ever given up—for whatever reason, even if it happened to be us—a profession at which she excelled.

“Damn,” I growled out of the corner of my mouth at intermission, “it works better here than in life.” Bridget jabbed my ribs with her elbow. But it was true. I resented Mother for alleging that her talent was less important than the happiness of her three children. Given a choice, we would have been just as happy all these years if we could have cued her and watched her go out where she belonged.

Afterward, I told her that. Not in her dressing room with clumps of friends and well-wishers squeezing through to congratulate her, but out on the street, past the stage door jammed with autograph seekers—through which she strode looking neither left nor right, even when they squealed, “Miss Sullavan, Miss Sullavan!” and plucked at her coat and beseeched her with their outstretched autograph books—as we accompanied her to Sardi’s or wherever the traditional celebration was held that night.

“Mother,” I said, trying to keep pace with her, “how could you ever retire? Was it really to raise children? We don’t want that excuse hanging around our necks—you’re no housewife and we didn’t ask you to be. We were well enough taken care of—what about all those nurses and cooks and gardeners? Now we feel gypped.”

“Gypped?”
She swung around, her voice cracking with amusement.

“Well”—I gulped, thoroughly excited by my daring—“cheated. You
are
Margaret Sullavan. What’s wrong with that?”

The answer, which came later as we were driving home along the Merritt Parkway and which was revived in one form or another whenever the subject of acting came up again, was: “Most actors are basically neurotic people. Terribly, terribly unhappy. That’s one of the reasons they become actors. Nobody well adjusted would ever want to expose him or herself to a large group of strangers. Think of it. Insanity! Generally, by their very nature—that is, if they’re at all dedicated—actors do not make good parents. They’re altogether too egotistical and selfish. The better the actor—and, I hate to say it, the bigger the star—why, the more that seems to hold true. Honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever known one—not one!—star who was successfully able to combine a career and family life. The children usually grow up to be delinquents. That’s why”—she was addressing us from the front seat of the Nash Rambler as Kenneth drove, and her face, as she twisted in her seat, was very earnest—“I didn’t want to delude myself that I could do it either. Hold down the two jobs simultaneously. And I so much wanted to have the fun of being just a mother and nobody else. Believe me, I’ve never for one day regretted forgoing my career to spend time with the three of you. Never. It was much more important to me to be with you during your most formative years. Besides”—she yawned and smiled—“you know how I hate hard work.”

“But,” I persisted, “you must have liked it once.”

“Yes,” replied Mother, serious again. “When I began. It seemed very natural then. Now—I can’t explain why—my zest is gone. I suppose there’s a love-hate feeling. I do love rehearsals; at least they’re less dreary than playing the same part night after night. I used to think that acting was a kind of therapy, but now I think it creates psychological havoc. Actors become accustomed to being the center of attention, come to believe they’re
special
, set apart from other people. That’s dangerous and lonely. Actors
suffer;
look at all the instances of alcoholism, slit wrists, God knows what. As a result of which everybody else around suffers, too. Madness! And the built-in competition to be
special
, to be
different
, is deplorable. There are many fine, talented actors you’ve never heard of, while some of the most successful have no talent at all; they’re just better at getting attention. If
any
of you ever decides you want an acting career, I warn you I shall do everything in my power to prevent it.”

One of the fringe benefits of
The Deep Blue Sea
was the routine that it imposed on Mother’s life, one that was as much a grievance to her as a godsend to us. She arose long after we’d left for school, which freed the breakfast table for reading or arguing to our hearts’ content. Then, in order to get to the theatre in time to apply her make-up, she caught the 6:25 train into New York. This facilitated illicit television viewing and two-hour phone conversations with friends. Before matinée days, she would spend Tuesday and Friday nights in the city, which was a real boon. Normal discipline broke down; Elizabeth was mostly bark and no bite.

Another benefit was the new stature we gained socially from having a famous mother at work. Whereas before, few of our peers had had the opportunity to see her in anything (the days when first-class movies would be rerun on television were yet to come), now they could judge for themselves. Or their parents could judge for them. Besides, there was publicity to be sopped up; although Mother shunned publicity, she couldn’t completely curtail it.
Life
magazine came out and photographed her for an article:

CITY CELEBRITY IN COUNTRY SETTING

Margaret Sullavan manages with no trouble at all to lead a happy double life. Six nights a week she is a grand lady of the Broadway stage, taking curtain calls to tidal waves of applause after her great personal success in
The Deep Blue Sea
. Ten minutes later her other life
begins. She runs out the stage door into a waiting taxi and catches the 11:25 commuters’ train for her country house near Greenwich, Connecticut. There she becomes Mrs. Kenneth Wagg (husband is in the malted milk business) and busies herself with a hundred household chores having to do with her three children, her servants, kitchen, garden and dog.…

We were all photographed eating Virginia ham and skating on the frozen pond. And then, in the spring, when the pink dogwoods were at the height of their glory and the garden was solid tulips and daffodils,
Life
came back and photographed me in a strapless evening dress for an article on daughters of the stars.

That Mother would give her blessing to this latter idea was extremely odd, but, breaking her own rules with as much verve as she kept them, she even added a touch of mascara to my lashes and powdered my nose. (“I thought you forbid us to wear make-up on penalty of death.” “Absolutely
verboten;
most unbecoming. Hold still and don’t bat your eyelids. You’re so lucky to have the sort of face that won’t ever need much touching up; this is an exception; don’t get any ideas. In photographs, details can get washed out.”) Afterward, when the fashion editor offered me the strapless dress as a gift, Mother, to my further astonishment, let me keep it.

Then, one afternoon a few weeks later, she mysteriously called me into the living room after school. “I have a surprise for you,” she said, and handed me the June 1st copy of
Life
. I was on the cover. “Margaret Sullavan’s 15-year-old Brooke,” read the caption. I felt as if the breath had been knocked out of me.

“But, Mother,” I gasped, inanely scrutinizing the life-size photograph of my profile under the red-and-white
Life
banner, “did you know? Did you give them permission?”

She smiled, very pleased. “I felt I owed it to you” was her answer, and she would not elaborate.

As this occurred just before school let out and the annual summer country club dances began, I was able to derive a maximum of attention from my cover. Fellow tenth-graders were reverential; snotty juniors and seniors nodded to me in the corridors between classes. A new delegation of boys from Brunswick, older and more sophisticated, with drivers’ licenses and their own cars and a practiced way of dancing close, of kissing good night, of introducing themselves to Mother and Kenneth while everyone
waited for my grand entrance down the front stairs, began materializing. “Sniffing around,” Elizabeth grunted. Bill surreptitiously took a roll of nude pictures of me skinny-dipping and sold them to Brunswick students for black-market prices. He had quite a profitable business going until Mother confiscated the negatives. And Bridget, although she never said a word, was envious; I could tell by her silence.

Bridget, at fourteen, was becoming as impossible in her own way as I had been in mine. (Mother and I liked to think I had, by now, passed through the most acute fevers of adolescence.) Bridget’s way was quite different. Her rebellions took the form of strange fasts and silences. She hid her uneaten food in the playroom cupboards. Once when I searched there for paints, I came upon a lump of desiccated liver wrapped in paper napkins. By mentally retracing our dinner menus as far back as I was able, I reckoned the age of that petrified scrap at two months.

Bridget’s silences drove Mother crazy. Mother did not like to be ignored. And Bridget did not like to be criticized. She might withdraw to her room and not be seen again for many hours. Nor did she like what she considered to be Mother’s insincere, larger-than-life charm. What, in fact, Mother thought of as Southern graciousness, Bridget saw as strained, fake, hypocritical.

For instance, Mother might hurl down the telephone and exclaim, “Good gooby, what a bore Helen Dodge is. She’s on her way over here right this minute with a smoked turkey—I’m trapped! There goes my beautiful selfish morning, my nude sunbathing, and my fingernails, my toenails, my clean hair, my checks!”

And then, when Helen Dodge rang the doorbell ten minutes later, Mother would embrace her as if they were long-lost sisters and beg her to stay for lunch. At lunch, increasingly offended by Mother’s effusive high spirits, Bridget would say less and less, barely answering poor Helen Dodge’s well-meant questions about school.

Mother would cringe with shame, which she contrived to conceal with sparkling bravado: “Speak up, darling! You’re mumbling and you know how deaf I am.”

Slowly, as if a shade were being drawn over a window, Bridget’s face would withdraw from the conversation as well. Move by move, she would match Mother’s act with her own. It was
unsettling to witness. The more animated Mother became, the more expressionless Bridget. Her unmistakable aim was to become invisible and vanish.

“How could you do this to me?” Mother would fume afterward. “You know perfectly well that
any
and
every
guest in my house is to be treated with respect
whatever the circumstances
—in the middle of an earthquake, for God’s sake! You’ve been brought up to have good manners, you’ve been set a good example by both your father and me—in this respect, at least, we concur—Where do you think you’re going? Don’t roll your eyes up to heaven and leave the room when I’m talking to you!”

Bridget remained but, without saying a word, made it clear she was no longer present.

It was decided that I should go to boarding school for my junior and senior years. A Swiss boarding school had long been one of Mother’s dreams: “You’re so lucky that I can afford it; oh, I would give anything to have the opportunity to ski beautifully, to speak perfect French!” But, because I was swept up in the Greenwich social whirl and couldn’t bear to leave it, I scotched that dream in favor of something closer to home. Bridget, on the other hand, suddenly professed a desire to get as far away as possible. To everyone’s surprise, she announced that she would actually prefer to go to Switzerland. Then Bill, having considered his life alone without his two sisters, decided he, too, wanted to go away to school. So, in the fall of 1953, the three of us left home.

I was sixteen, Bridget fourteen, Bill twelve. It never occurred to me it was the last time we would live together as a family.

For all my resistance to the idea of leaving my beloved friends, my feature-story contests, my pink-and-white room, my role as troublemaker and provocateur, my convoluted flirtations, I’d begun to look forward to the novelty of freedom. Mother—after a winter of hauling me up and down the Eastern seaboard to investigate all the blue-chip girls’ schools, and of glossing over my bothersome candor when interviewed by their eager headmistresses (“No, Miss St. John, actually I
don’t want
to go away to school; I’m happy where I am”)—had, on her own, entered me at the Madeira School, located in Greenway, Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C. Madeira was reputed to be very strict and academically tough; it also satisfied certain social and geographical requisites. (“Lucky you to be in Virginia, my home state!”)

Greenwich had come to fit me comfortably. I’d broken it in, maybe outgrown it. Crucial events had taken place under its sheltering sky. My first evening dress, properly virginal—white organdy, ruffled, off-the-shoulder—followed by many other evening dresses, graduating to a strapless tulle, nipped in above by a painful waist cincher that left its hook marks on my flesh and a bone-stiffened bra that jabbed into the tender spot between my breasts, with its skirt belled out below by a set of crinolines modishly collected like silver bracelets. It was a time when countless orchid corsages were left to shrivel in the icebox.

Then there were my first stockings, sheer and seamed, and black suède heels—now, that had been some fight! Mother forbade them both until everyone else in the eighth grade had been sporting them for a year. She violently disapproved of all those emblems of budding eroticism. “You won’t have anything to look forward to when you grow up,” she’d remonstrate. “You’ll become hardened and blasé. I didn’t wear high heels till I was seventeen. And as for bras, it’s pointless for me to waste money on a bra if you have nothing to fill it with.” Consequently, my first bra was also the last bra to make an appearance in my class. I also had my first menstrual period, for which the fashionable euphemism at school was “falling off the roof.” In those days we had euphemisms for anything remotely sexual.